John Rundle - John Rundle is the Interdisciplinary Professor of Physics, Civil Engineering and Geology and Director of the Center for Computational Science and Engineering at the University of California Davis.
His research is focused on understanding the dynamics of earthquakes through numerical simulations; pattern analysis of complex systems; dynamics of driven nonlinear Earth systems; and adaptation in general complex systems.
Geoffrey West - Geoffrey West (b. 1940) is a physicist. He was born in a rural town in western England and moved to London when he was 13. He received a bachelor's degree in physics from Cambridge and pursued graduate studies in California at Stanford. He eventually became a Stanford faculty member before he joined the particle theory group at New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory. After Los Alamos, he became president of the Santa Fe Institute, where he works on biological issues (such as power laws in biology such as the allometric law). He has since been honored as one of Time magazine's "Time 100."
Forecasting Natural Disasters in the Chaotic and Complex Earth with John Rundle and discussant Geoffrey B. West.
In the recent past we have seen the December 2004 Sumatra earthquake and tsunami; the August 2005 Hurricane Katrina that destroyed New Orleans and the Gulf Coast; and the Pakistan earthquake in October 2005. Other, less catastrophic disasters include a multiplicity of landslides, flooding, wildfires, tornadoes and epidemics.
For many of these events, vast quantities of satellite data are opening new horizons to better understanding them. Using space-time patterns and information about the dynamics of these high-dimensional nonlinear earth systems, it is often possible to construct numerical simulations that can be used to make predictions about the evolution of the system and the possible occurrence of extreme events- Santa Fe Institute